Alexandre Prot grew up in a family where banking was the family business. His father, Baudouin Prot, was chairman of BNP Paribas, one of the largest banks in Europe. His son went on to build a company designed to be everything a traditional bank was not.
That contrast is the most personal detail the public record offers about Qonto's co-founder. Little else is documented about his upbringing, so the story has to be told through what he and his partner built.
The idea was to give freelancers and small companies a proper business account without the queue at a branch.
Steve Anavi, the other founder, came from a different corner. He studied at EPFL in Switzerland, took an MBA at INSEAD, worked at Deloitte, co-founded a start-up called Smok.io, and then ran operations at Groupon. He had seen the machinery of a fast-scaling consumer business and the gaps in how small businesses were served.
In April 2016 the pair founded the company, then under the name Olinda. The idea was to give freelancers and small companies a proper business account without the queue at a branch. By January 2017 they had raised a 1.6 million euro seed round from Alven Capital, Valar Ventures and angels. In July of the same year they added 10 million euros from their two main investors and opened the service to the public.
The crucial step came in 2018 when the French regulator granted a payment institution licence. It meant Qonto could hold customer money legally. Money kept coming: 104 million euros in January 2020 with Tencent, and in 2022 a 486 million euro round at 4.4 billion. It entered Spain, Germany and Italy in 2019, bought Germany's Penta in 2022 and the accounting tool Regate in 2024.
Growth came with a cost. In 2023 the French Modern Pentathlon Federation lost 672,139 euros to a scammer and sued Qonto over its security duties. In June 2025 Qonto was ordered to repay the full amount. A month later, in July 2025, it applied for a full banking licence.
Numbers now say the strategy worked. Revenue reached 495 million euros in 2025, with net income of about 93 million and some 600,000 business customers. In January 2026 the company dropped its old legal name for Qonto.
For a first-time founder the lesson sits in the family tree. Prot grew up next to the thing he later challenged. Knowing an incumbent from the inside can be the best head start, as long as you choose to build what it would not.